Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium

Buket Kitapçı Bayrı, Myrto Veikou (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

268 Seiten

2025
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-69783-3 (ISBN)

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This book offers a novel twist, combining intra-/inter-disciplinary research across the humanities and social sciences by transforming two distinct disciplinary concepts (liminality from social anthropology and space from cultural geography) into methodological devices for historical investigation.

Liminal Spaces and Spatial Practices in Byzantium offers a novel twist, combining intra-/inter-disciplinary research across the humanities and social sciences by transforming two distinct disciplinary concepts (liminality from social anthropology and space from cultural geography) into methodological devices for historical investigation. The focus has been an investigation of conceptions of spatial liminality in the Byzantine world.

This book showcases alternatives to binary oppositions such as inside/outside, core/periphery, isolation/connectedness, stability/instability, known/unknown, earthly/heavenly, self/other, and good/bad through delineating liminality as an epistemological tool. In this volume, the authors were invited to offer an analysis of Byzantine spatial experiences (attested through material remains or texts) as a sort of working platform from which to assess in due course the presence of a liminal dimension in medieval spatiotemporal situations. They have sought to understand whether certain types of spaces such as rivers, deserts, islands, forests, mountains, houses, thresholds, gates, monasteries, lighthouses, and bridges accommodate–or even create–liminal situations in the eyes of the people experiencing them.

This book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Byzantine history and culture.

Buket Kitapçı Bayrı is a scholar of late Byzantine and Medieval Islamic History (circa 1200–1500). Her previous publication, Warriors, Martyrs, and Dervishes: Moving Frontiers, Shifting Identities in the Land of Rome (13th–15th Centuries) (2020), examines the late medieval cultural transformation of Asia Minor and the Balkans through Byzantine and Turkish frontier epics and hagiographical texts by applying anthropological and literary theories to perceptions of shared space/shared story-world, place-making processes, and identity formation. Myrto Veikou is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Patras (Greece). Her first PhD thesis in Byzantine Archaeology was published in 2012 (Byzantine Epirus: A Topography of Transformation: Settlements from the 7th to the 12th Centuries in Southern Epirus and Aetoloacarnania, Greece). Her second PhD thesis in Byzantine Philology and Literary Studies was published as Spatial Paths to Holiness—Literary ‘Lived Spaces’ in Eleventh-Century Byzantine Saints’ Lives (2023).

Introduction

Liminal Spaces Inside and Beyond the Byzantine World

Myrto Veikou and Buket Kitapçi Bayri

Part I: Natural Space as Liminal

Chapter 1

Encounters in Crocodile Waters: The Nile as a Liminal Riverscape in Monastic Egypt

Darlene Brooks Hedstrom

Chapter 2

Desert Islands: Aspects of the Byzantine Perception of Liminal Space

Charis Messis

Chapter 3

Liminal Insularity or Islandness? Relational and Comparative Perspectives on Big Islands in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea in the Early Middle Ages (Sixth–Tenth Centuries)

Luca Zavagno, Christoph Kilger and Max Kusserow

Part II: Social Space as Liminal: Public and Private

Chapter 4

Myths Transformed: Perceptions of Ancient Sculpture in Byzantine Liminal Spaces

Livia Bevilacqua

Chapter 5

Liminal Experiences of Byzantine Fortifications

Nikolas Bakirtzis and Myrto Veikou

Chapter 6

Visiting Late Antique Elite Houses: On Rituals, Routes, and Courtyards through the Lens of Liminality

Lale Özgenel

Chapter 7

Crossing Private Liminal Spaces: Thresholds and Passageways in the “Urban Mansion” of Sagalassos and Contemporaneous Urban Elite Houses in Late Antique Western Anatolia

Inge Uytterhoeven

Chapter 8

Existential and Spatial Liminality in Byzantine Monasteries: Insights from the Enclosure Wall and its Gateways

Maréva U

Part III: Liminality through Movement

Chapter 9

Athonite Transhumance Routes between the Ninth and the Sixteenth Centuries: A Network of Liminal Ecosystems, Spaces, and Interactions

Guillaume Bidaut

Chapter 10

Marking the limēn: Lighthouses and Beacons as Spiritual Metaphors

Veronica della Dora

Chapter 11

Perceptions of Bridges as Liminal Spaces in Byzantium

Galina Fingarova

Erscheinungsdatum	11.12.2025
Reihe/Serie	Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies
Zusatzinfo	71 Halftones, black and white; 71 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	690 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Altertum / Antike
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
	Technik ► Architektur
ISBN-10	1-032-69783-0 / 1032697830
ISBN-13	978-1-032-69783-3 / 9781032697833
Zustand	Neuware